Published
I am amazed that more organizations don’t take advantage of podcasting as a way of sharing ideas across their members, employees and with the wider community. The Major Projects Association podcast is still in its infancy but its already something we have embraced with enthusiasm. For each of our half-day or full-day seminars, we work extremely hard to bring together a great programme of speakers, who invest considerable time and effort to prepare their presentations. At the event itself, the benefit of all of this hard work is focused on between just 60-120 individuals, who are the delegates for the day.
However, by corralling as many of the speakers/panellists as we can, to join us for a Teams call, sometime within a couple of weeks of the original event, we get the opportunity to give them a second bite at the cherry and to create a piece of content which can be broadcast to an open audience.
Points for further discussion
We’ve developed a simply formula for each podcast. Andy Murray, our Executive Director, picks up one thing that each of the speakers/panellists has said in the seminar and which struck him as particularly noteworthy, and invites him or her to expand on the point. He then uses one or more of the ‘Points for further discussion’ which we always generate on our highlights report for the event and which look at the implications of the ideas shared during the event for major projects, and invites the podcast guests to offer their own take on it.
Conversation is the most natural form of knowledge share
The great beauty of the podcast medium lies in its simplicity. Presentations at a seminar, however good, are fundamentally artificial and because they are prepared (which is a good thing!), they are polished to deliver a particular message. I am sure you can all remember being struck by the change of tone at a particular presentation, when the speaker switched from presenter mode to respond to audience Q&A. The podcast conversation invites the guests to respond spontaneously to the host and to each other, and the result is a very human form of knowledge sharing; one that recognises that our audience are generally already well-informed about the subject at hand and, consequently, can derive a great deal of insight from hearing a discussion from individuals representing different organisations and different sectors. The podcast format invites the listener to reflect, in the moment, about the implications of what is being said. Since each episode is short (less than 40 minutes) and each interaction between the host and a given guest is even briefer, we have a medium that makes assimilation, intuitive, very human and which is very shareable with others.
Please do take advantage of the Major Projects Podcast, which is available on a variety of common platforms, including Spotify, and share it with your colleagues. Our next planned podcast will involve the speakers from the upcoming seminar on Systems Thinking, Systems Leading.